Last week we proposed that a group of citizens concerned about public education meet regularly at Kump Education Center on the first Friday of every month. Because several people have shown their interest, we plan to hold our first meeting Friday, Feb. 7 at 4 p.m. in the Learning Lab at Kump Center, 401 S. Randolph Ave. across from Kroger.

Now that we know Harman and Pickens Schools will not be closing, we need to look for other options that will make Randolph County Schools more effective.

With county achievement test scores nearly the lowest in West Virginia and Harman High listed as the lowest performing high school in the state, every citizen should be concerned. Times are changing for modern families.

We will not attract and retain young families in Randolph County unless our public schools can show improvement in academic performance. Randolph County is an example of an international problem of declining populations with increasing costs for education.

Unfortunately, the West Virginia Legislature has made the serious mistake of dividing a shrinking population into smaller numbers by taking funding away from public schools and funding other education school options.

I realize that my family is and has been at the center of local turmoil about public education for five generations. My grandfather helped establish the WV County-Unit School System in the 1930s during the Great Depression, my mother served on the Randolph County School Board in the 1950’s during the Baby Boom, and I taught teacher education at Davis & Elkins College from 1999 to 2006. Our son, who was a teacher at Elkins High, is now teaching teachers at WV Wesleyan, while his children attend elementary, middle and high schools in Elkins.

The demands on schools change with every new generation. I remember twenty-five years ago when Harman and Homestead Schools had the best reading scores in Randolph County, and my college students from Harman were among the best students we had in teacher education at D&E.

In those days we had more students and much better test scores across the County than we do now.

When I was a young Baby Boomer, demographers believed that the world would be over populated if the population continued to increase at the midcentury rate.

However, during the last 50 years our population has been steadily declining in West Virginia. Now declining populations are becoming serious problems all over the world.

This week I attended a focus group for young parents and learned that most of them are single moms trying to provide for children on small salaries. When schools are closed, these moms have no free child care, and they need high tech training themselves to get better paying jobs. Young people do not want to have families now because it is so expensive and so stressful.